Monday, May 25, 2015

--SOME PEOPLE NEED TO DIE TO FEEL EXCITED

The Fortune Teller

The
two runners were so odd together that joggers and cyclists on the path did
double-takes, same as when spotting minor celebrities in random locales. The tallest one was bald, with a peculiar,
fetus-shaped head and wary, disconnected eyes.
The other was short and compact like a modern-day appliance, with more
hair on his body than your run-of-the-mill llama. And yet, for their many differences, the pair
had a few remarkable things in common, their maleness being obvious and their
cache of untold secrets being less so.

One
of the runners was a pastor and the other—the tall lopsided-head runner-- a
bank executive, who was also covertly a drug addict. The addict’s habit was so long-standing and
familiar anymore that it was not unlike a scar you wear below your eye—a wound
received brutally during your youth-- but now never see. The addict had even done a few bumps this
morning instead of coffee--“moguls” they’d called the miniature domes of white
powder in college, and his heart kick-drummed strong for the moment.

They
were only on mile three, with fifteen more to go. Their alignment was off emotionally and
physically. Thus far their conversation
had been awkward and choppy as they tried to fend off feelings of embarrassment
for being together at all. At the same
time they struggled to find a rhythm to their strides so that they could match
pace.

The
addict’s name was Preston. Preston was
nervous for several reasons: he had never run eighteen miles in his life, let
alone on blow, let alone with a man of God, who, even if he was wearing tight
shorts and wife-beater mesh tank, was still a pastor. Preston wondered how many guesses it would
take the common person to name the pastor’s occupation dressed in such a get-up. Preston thought of all the uniforms he had
worn in his life, from boy scouts to a mouse costume for Halloween to a wedding
dress because one kinky night his wife had asked him. We all wear uniforms, he thought, depending
on the event and which wound we’re trying to assuage or deflect attention
from. Halloween really was an everyday
affair if you thought about it.

“You
okay?” the stocky pastor asked. He ran
robotically, but with an efficient use of his limbs. His hair was dry, not a drop of sweat on him
anywhere. It was chestnut-colored and
wavy, shaped in a mullet. Preston did
not know it was permissible for pastors to have such a hair style.

The
pastor’s name was Adam, same as the planet’s first man. Adam meant mud or earth or soil, in Greek or
Hebrew, Preston remembered from Sunday school classes. God made man from the earth and then gave him
a straightforward no nonsense name.

Adam felt
cursed. Partially he blamed his
parents. His father had been a Baptist
Minister while his mother championed the choir.
Adam was led to the Lord before he was old enough to understand if
that’s the route he actually preferred.
And then there was the issue of his name. “The Lord God formed the man from the dust of
the ground.” His name, its earthy essence,
annoyed Adam from the very beginning. It
felt burdensome, like a weight vest he’d been forced to wear even when
swimming. It seemed impossible to live
up to such a name. The only one worse
would be Moses. The inability to meet
the name’s expectations left Adam feeling perpetually dirty. Others saw something different, but he knew,
and the fact that he did ate away at his inner confidence much the way a
parasite feasts on its host, becoming visible only through its eventual
physical wreckage. Adam grew
delirious. His equilibrium was
shot. He had heavy night sweats. His vision was blurry and spotted. When he closed his eyes he saw squiggly
particles floating across his retina and then other shapes and forms, those of
boys he knew, posing naked. This war
raged on, day by day, ravaging Adam’s sensibility. Living became an exhausting chore, the
demands of presenting a false front unbearable.
He despised himself. He had not
grown up in a hunting family, but occasionally he’d slow down when driving past
the little red store with the triple sign shouting, GUNS! AMMO! BAIT! Adam had been raised to be solution-oriented
and a weapon could certainly solve his dilemma.
Yet suicide was a sin, too.
Adam’s head spun and he chuckled to himself, thinking about his
predicament, his preposterous charade.

“You
all right?” This time it was Preston’s
turn.

For
a moment Adam had forgotten where he was, what he was he doing. This happened sometimes, actually often, and
privately Adam believed it might be the onset of Alzheimer’s, a wicked rebuke
for a man so duplicitous. “I’m fine,”
Adam said, hawking. “I must have got a
bug caught in my throat.”

Preston
rubbed his bald head and wished he’d worn a cap or at least had sense to apply
sunscreen. The day was cloudless and
stern. Beyond the heads of the bushy
cedar trees the sky hung an arrogant blue color seen only during Pacific
Northwest summers. Sweat trickled down
his chest, into his pubic region making him want to scratch.

One
morning several months back Lisa, Preston’s wife, had just got out of the
shower and was toweling her auburn hair dry when she stepped on his misplaced
vial of coke. Preston made up a story
about seeing old college friends, how one had presented the tiny cylinder as a
belated birthday gift. Lisa didn’t like
it, not the story or the drugs themselves, but she let it go until Preston woke
up in the middle of the night a week later and did a different vial of powder,
half a gram in just two minutes. He
hadn’t even bothered going to another room to do it or to turn on the bathroom
fan in order to camouflage the sound of his Hoovering the white dust. Lisa clutched the lacy fringe of her bedtime
camisole. “Oh my God,” she said. In that first instant, Lisa’s shock wasn’t
directly about the drugs, but rather the fact that her husband resembled a
bludgeoned victim. Yes, the rims of
Preston’s nostrils looked like they had dried toothpaste stuck on them, but an
inky crimson flow streamed out of them, drenching Preston’s neck and coating
his chest and belly though Preston hadn’t yet noticed.

He
didn’t go to rehab. Instead the couple
compromised and Preston agreed to attend church with Lisa every other
week. That was where he met Pastor Adam,
when he got into an uncomfortable discussion about nothing, Adam clasping him
on the shoulder or patting Preston’s arm in a way that Preston took as signs
that Lisa had spilled the beans. To
compensate, Preston mentioned he had been a runner, same as Adam. Preston had almost made the Olympics years
ago. Preston had just done a line in the
church bathroom, seated on the stall and flushing so as to overpower the
snorting sound. Now the drug surged in
Preston’s blood stream becoming a living entity independent of Preston, a pit
bull baring its fangs through a chain link fence. In a matter of five minutes Preston had
agreed to run with the pastor who was training for the Seattle Marathon. Preston didn’t realize what he’d done until
he was home that night and sneaking another line. He hadn’t run in years, not even a
block. And now he was going to run
eighteen miles, with a man of God no less.

They’d
met in Duvall, a halfway point between their homes in Monroe and Falls
City. The Snoqualmie Trail went as far
east as Montana, Adam explained, its name changing a few times in between.

“That
so?” Preston said, and it was a feat just to get those two words out. They were on mile five. A sharp needle stitched Preston’s side and
made him think of that scene in “Jaws” where the giant shark leaps onto the
boat and the captain slides into the fish’s bear-trap mouth.

“You
okay?” Preston wasn’t, but he thought
he’d slug the pastor if he asked that again.
He hawked and spat and picked up his pace, not answering.

Preston’s mother had
been a housewife at first, then after her husband died she tried selling baked
goods door-to-door around the neighborhood, garden vegetables outside Hanlon’s
hardware store with permission from Leonard Sikes, a man with curling white
nose hair, gout and a class ring from Pasco Senior High, same as Preston’s
mother. “Cucumbers, get your
cucumbers! Ten cents each!” his mother
yelled, waving the phallic green stumps overhead. When he wasn’t in wrestling or choir
practice, Preston was required to go along.
He knew many of the customers and since there was no probable means of
hiding—what with the wagon full of vegetables, the political campaign-style
signs, and his mother shouting like a carnival barker. His humiliation was sealed and, in this and
other ways, featuring other forms of shame, Preston was self-taught.

The pastor wore a
running belt with small, plastic canteens of colored sports drink. He swallowed hardily, as if it was
tequila. He handed Preston the bottle
without breaking stride. Preston
swallowed but didn’t accept it. He’d
forgotten to bring any of his own liquid for rehydration. “That’s okay.”

Adam arched a wooly
eye brow. “You sure?”

Preston nodded. He held up one palm like a traffic cop while
the other hand fisted involuntarily.

Her first venture was
charging people for weather forecasts.
These were mostly rich folks from the north end who didn’t trust the
inaccurate broadcasters on television (they weren’t yet known as
meteorologists, same as janitors weren’t maintenance workers and used cars were
just used instead of pre-owned.) Rich
people counted on a thick blanket of snow for good skiing and didn’t want to
make a trip to the mountain, only to be disappointed.

Preston’s mother
suffered from severe arthritis that left her stooped, with a sack-sized
hunchback and knobby, twisted fingers.
The upside was her ability to detect weather, her joints a Geiger
counter whenever rain or snow storms loomed.
She developed something of a reputation and earned loyalty from even the
most jaded socialites.

Then came the
profession that suited her, the one she would be known for, the one that would
change many lives, including the boy’s, for the good and bad.

“Your folks live
around here?” Adam asked. Preston had
been wondering how long it would take for the stupid small talk to come around.

“No,” he said, the
word blunt.

“Where then?”

“Well that’s a long
story.”

Adam held out his
hands as if claiming he hadn’t stolen anything.
“We’ve got twelve more miles.”

“We do?” Preston
said.

“Hey, if you’re not
up for it.”

“I’m good. Don’t worry about me.” That’s what he told Lisa, too.

“Whatever you say,
chief.”

Preston’s mother had always been a believer
in destiny, and now she’d found hers.
Yet she knew survival hinged on whether or not she could make a profit
from it.

“A fortune teller?”
Adam said. This was not unusual, Preston
tripping himself up. Why hadn’t he just
invented a story? Why had he even
started talking about his mother? His
running partner was a pastor for God’s sake, and here was Preston, pitting one
supernatural arm against the other. But
it was too late to back out now.

“She didn’t call it
that.”

“Well, what then?”
Adam asked, putting an extra foot of width between them.

Except in cases where
the customer requested them, his mother abstained from using tarot cards. They made her feel gaudy and cheap, contrived
and uninspired. Same with the crystal
ball; no matter how long or how hard she stared, Preston’s mother never saw
anything other than air bubbles frozen in the glass. She preferred a more modern approach, a far
more intimate experience such as cupping a patron’s hands in her palms. She thought of it as a safe spoon position
for strangers just starting to get acquainted.

She read her first
customer’s palm and confidently declared he would fall in love that very day
and be married by month’s end.

“Impossible!” the man
said. His eyes were squishy and his
breath in the enclosed space gave off the hint of whisky overlaid with
spearmint gum.

Preston’s mother
puckered her lips and leaned forward, squeezing the man’s scratchy
calluses. “It’s true,” she said, and the
words blew from her lips like a Monarch butterfly.

The man blinked
several times.

“It’s true,” she
repeated, making him shiver.

Perhaps she did get a
sign that day, or maybe it was ploy, nevertheless Preston’s widowed mother and
the man, Frank Stojack, an unpublished playwright and auto mechanic, fell into
a spiraling, molten romance. By the end
of that June, the pair was married.

Adam thought about
his own mother. In the mornings before
church she ironed his dad’s shirts and slacks in the kitchen, humming while
young Adam sat writing out bible verses to memorize. Often Adam’s mother would fall into a trance
and so he’d be free to stare unabated, taking in her A-line dress. With its compressed waistline, pie-shaped
upper torso, with the wavy, curtain-effect skirt, the gown became a sort of
satin sculpture in Adam’s mind. The
young boy imagined the maker of the dress sitting down in front of an easel
with all the aplomb of a master painter.
The designer might hesitate for a second, scratching his face as he
searched his memory for the illustration that had come to him during a dream
the night before, and once he’d captured it, he’d take the large pad and begin
furiously sketching. If he was so
inclined—and if there was enough time for Adam to finish his daydream—the designer
would retrieve a bolt of fabric and scissors and cut and stitch and perfect
each pucker until his drawn creation became the real thing, fitted now
precisely on the frame of his hymn-humming mother.

Imagination wasn’t
always enough. On occasion, Adam needed
to break through the veneer, test the waters, so to speak, and determine the
authenticity of his inner desires. Every
so often he was left home alone and during those times he’d sneak into his
parent’s bedroom and flip through his mother’s closet, his vision keen and
discriminating. Adam’s favorite frock
was the speckled blue organza. With a
sheath of netting across the shoulders, it was a cross between cotton candy and
an Easter egg. He wore his mother’s lavender
lipstick with it, her pushup brassiere, a pearl necklace and matching bracelet. If time allowed, he might even curl his
bangs. Then, Adam became hostess of a
grand party. Everyone in attendance was
a friend and each commented on his stunning attire. “Why thank you,” he would say, clasping his
cheek or chest and blushing freely.

That night, after his
parents had come home, Adam laid awake, staring at the ceiling where a fresco
of the disappointed messiah looked back at him.
If Adam closed his eyes, he saw nude school boy models. If his eyes were open, he saw the forlorn Christ. He finally got out of bed and, using the
blunt point of a paperclip, cut open his skin.
The sight of blood was a relief.
He watched it bead up, then pool and spill over his wrist. The drops were shy at first, then assertive
as they exploded brightly into the thick white shag carpeting.

In the morning Adam,
came to breakfast with the tender wound wrapped in strands of torn bed sheet.

“What is this?” his
father asked. “No son of mine gets a
tattoo.”

Adam’s mother
unknotted the bandages with the deliberation of an experienced nurse, like a
prostitute undressing a virgin. “But
look,” she said, exposing what Adam had done.
Her eyes shimmered with moisture.
She couldn’t vocalize her pride, not with her husband the minister
there, but later she would whisper in the boy’s ear. “I think it’s lovely. What a brave thing to do,” she said about the
holy cross he had carved into his skin.

As they approached
mile nine the trail swung northward, bring them close to Highway 202. Being that it was a Saturday and being that
they had started their run so early in the morning, the road had very little
traffic, yet distant stereo music blasted in the air. The music was bass-heavy, hip hop. It bounced through the atmosphere like Morse
code you felt rather than read. Adam
heard it first, then Preston. The taller
of them created his own word set, rhyming “murder” with “absurder,” “twenty street ho’s” with “pimped up
gringo’s,” “great tail” with “make bail” and “my little sista’s trippin’” with
“see what you been missin’.” It meant
nothing, none of it, but during creation, it passed a little time.

Preston’s mother
hadn’t necessarily been husband-hunting.
Oh sure, she got lonely from time to time, but she wasn’t looking for a
financial hand out as some people assumed.
On the contrary, now that her first hand-holding prediction had come
true, she felt emboldened. She became
more ambitious and career-minded. She
read, “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” She set goals and listed them in florid,
cursive writing, the spiral notebook pages torn out with their frilly edges
taped to the mirror.

At their wedding,
Preston’s mother gave out home-made business cards that read:

RUTH STOJACK

The Answers You Need,
From the Person You Can Trust

(509) 535-1521

Some cards she tucked
in the palms of awkward relatives she’d not seen since the moon landing. Some poked out of the cake plates by the
folded tip of a napkin. Many surprised
men—and wives--would find her card days later, placed in the breast pocket of a
suit jacket or starch-encrusted dress shirt pocket.

The runners reached
the beginning of the incline. It was
slight, yet Preston’s legs felt leaden from the added strain. Perspiration kept dripping into his eyes,
burning. His nose ran. Sweat squiggled into his ears, in between his
buttocks. Every inch of him was
soaked. How many more miles did they
have? “Mind if I borrow a hit of that
sports drink?” he asked.

Adam gallantly handed
the container over, his expression not changing.

Preston spit the
first swallow out. It tasted like
century-old tea mixed with urine.

Adam wasn’t one of
those that forced-fed unbelievers God.
He knew the power of patience.
After all, it wasn’t a sales pitch he offered, rather eternal life. Adam tried to be an everyday Joe, unthreatening,
accessible, a good listener. Privately,
though, he wished he was funnier. On
stage, in front of the pulpit, he could make the congregation laugh, but those
were jokes culled from various research sources. Entertaining folks wasn’t as easy as it
looked, no sir. Adam spent an inordinate
amount of time on the internet.
Sometimes he surfed the web the entire day and into the night.

Once he got used to
the taste, Preston drank three-quarters of the bottle. Greedily, he considered downing the entire
jug. “Thanks,” he said, handing it back.

When
Adam shook the container it pissed Preston off more than it should have. So what if he’d drunk all of it? The guy had five others.

Preston’s mother
would never read his palm. She’d shoo
him away each time he asked-- “Go, get out of here!”—like a pest or the
neighbor’s dog. She feared seeing bad
news. Such a thing was not altogether
uncommon in her line of work. In those
cases, Preston’s mother had to decide if she should lie and save her customers
from undeserved fear and torment, or send them into terrible panic regarding
their unfortunate yet inevitable future.
She well understood that fibbing could possibly endanger her
professional credibility. “You told my
sister she would have a long, happy life, and look—she’s been hit by a train!”

Preston’s mother
loved her little boy enough to spare him a reading. In his case, she was satisfied learning as
they went.

Adam’s mother loved
her boy, too. In fact, she was the boy’s
best friend. She was soft and familiar
and, up until he was well into his teens, Adam might come home from a difficult
school day of being bullied and curl up against her downy bosom. She always smelled of cooking scents:
rosemary, oregano, paprika, or cinnamon if pie-making had happened earlier in
the day. She would smooth his forehead
and kiss it there, her palm as hot as his skin.
“God loves you so much,” she would whisper, making Adam convulse even
harder.

At mile twelve Adam’s
pace had not slowed, he was charging hard.

“How fast’re we
going?” Preston asked.

The pastor had all
kinds of running accessories, including a GPS watch that reported heart rate,
location, calorie burn, stride length and speed. It could make a map of everywhere they’d been
and anticipate where they were going.
All the answers were there in the watch.

Preston’s mother
claimed the answers she got came from the bloodstream emanating from the
heart. “Its nature and chemistry, that’s
all. Heat rises through the skin pores,
and these vapors, they’re invisible smoke signals, if you can picture it with
me, wisps of a code. And that code is
the truth,” she told him, her eyes distended.
She had a thick German accent which seemed to slur when she was
excited. “A person with—“ she never
wanted to use the word “gift” because she felt it sounded hokey, like a
breakfast cereal gimmick”—the ability
can see what no one else can. To that
person the pictures and words are the same as if they’ve been written on a
blackboard, you know, like in school?”

“We’re tearing it up,” the pastor said, not
even breathing hard. “We’re going seven
and a half minutes per mile.”
Adam was thirty-five years old
and he needed a race time of seven minutes and twenty-seven seconds to qualify
for the Boston Marathon, which was his goal.
At the pace they were going, however, Preston would be dead within the
hour.

“Nah,” the pastor
said. He seemed to be running in place,
a carousel pony sliding up and down while the world turned.

“Go,” Preston said,
his voice snarling.

Adam took off.

Adam wished he’d
started running sooner in life. He
wished he’d pursued it seriously. In
school he’d never even thought to turn out for track. He had many regrets, and as each one began to
float up to be accounted for, he pushed them away and said a prayer aloud,
asking for God’s intercession.

Preston watched the
pastor sprint on. He thought about
stopping altogether. Indeed, he waited
until the pastor’s shape was too far away to discern.

His mother was big on
platitudes. “Quitters never prosper,”
she said. “A stitch in time saves
nine.”

The boys in junior
high football were so much larger than Preston.
He quit two weeks into summer workouts with a broken rib. His mother demanded he continue, but Jack
Stojack intervened. “Look at him, will
ya?” Jack was a dried-up Irish drunk,
shriveled like a happy raisin. “He’s
built like a goddamn gazelle, not a footballer.
It’s a rib broke now, next it’ll be his neck and when he gets himself
paralyzed, how’ll we foot those bills?”

“Quitters never
prosper,” his mother said.

Preston did opt out
of football, but he remembered his mother’s call for persistence.

He began to pester
her about a reading two, three times a day.
Instead of a salutation, he said, “When are you going to give me my
future?” He invoked issues of fairness. “You’re my mother. You do it for strangers and yet not for one
of your own.”

“Well, they pay me,
don’t they?”

“Ah, they do, and so
will I!”

She slapped him,
catching herself halfway through the motion so that the impact was not as
severe as it might have been otherwise.

“I’m sorry, Preston,
but there’s two things at work here.
One: you’re back-talking me.
Two—and I’ll just come out with it--I’m afraid.”

He hugged her around the waist, their two hearts bumping
into one another with aggression.

“But don’t call me a
fortune teller, whatever you do.
Sometimes it’s not a fortune I see but the opposite. Sometimes I see mighty, awful ruin.”

She led him to the
anteroom in the back of their house which was dimly lit except for the swath of
sun that illuminated the banks of the drawn curtain. She told him to sit. She drew up a chair for herself. She told him to shut up and think of nothing
but the universe in all its glory, flocks and flocks of twinkling star points.

“I’m getting dizzy,”
he teased.

She patted his
hand. “This is serious business. If you want fun and games, go and play your
damn Pac-Man.”

He apologized.

Not another word was
spoken. He saw the universe in a
dream. It was one, unending black carpet
bejeweled with rhinestones. He flew upon
it, ebony wind rifling through his hair and bringing his skin to goose
flesh. When he looked down he saw the
shells of glowing planets, none of them earth.
He could have stayed like this forever but his mother snapped her fingers
with a crisp, bat-cracking sound, and he opened his eyes.

“You future is
golden,” she said.

“What does that
mean?”

“What I just said.”

“That doesn’t make
any sense.”

She wrinkled her nose
and Preston noticed for the first time that she had a long black hair growing
out of the tip of it. He cursed himself
for getting distracting by the errant nose whisker. He’d meant to search her eyes. They always held the truth. The eyes either confirmed what a person spoke,
or they wavered and withdrew, and if they did the latter then you’d know it was
lies you were getting. That’s what his
mother had told Preston early on when she was explaining a few tricks of the
trade.

His mother stood
up. She walked fast. Preston wondered over the length of her
stride, the speed of it. Was it
exaggerated? Why would she offer him
only her back and conceal her eyes unless her eyes had a dark story to
tell? Why was she being so evasive if
the truth was nothing but good news?

One of the first
things Adam learned about the bible was that “The Gospels” meant “The Good
News.” The apostles were to spread the
good news about Jesus, forgiveness, grace and salvation. That was a key responsibility of all
Christians, including him.

Adam wondered about a
God that could overlook heinous acts with a simple confession and
declaration. That kind of love was
unfathomable. Indeed, the good news
seemed too good to be true.

And it haunted him
that he thought this. Alas, it tortured
him that he might likely be the only person on earth to contemplate such a
thought.

This fear and
confusion slithered through Adam’s intestines, sending his gut rumbling. He stopped running and staggered over the
side of the path, gasping, hands on hips.
He looked up into the trees and saw a haughty crow staring back at him,
its eyes unctuous and bright yellow.

Preston thought he
might be sick. Then he thought he needed
to pee or do the other. His mind played
the tricks his body was asking it to play, and he felt entirely helpless to
disobey.

He looked into the
chest of a swaying husk of an evergreen tree.
The space between branches formed a triangle of perfect white, and
Preston imagined it as a mountain of cocaine, pure and plentiful and potent, as
well as the end of things.

Just then the brush
on the side of the path shook. Tree
limbs, too.

A buck staggered out
in a fury, its legs springing crookedly, chaotically, with none of the beauty
Preston associated with deer. Might it be
under pursuit? Cougars were known to
lurk in the foothills around Issaquah and Snoqualmie, bear as well.

Preston expected the
buck’s trajectory to take it from one diagonal side of the dirt path to the
other, but the creature was entranced by a bizarre force, bucking like a rodeo
bull, eyes bulging, tongue foamy.

Preston sprinted as
it came after him, skipping in jagged prances.

He believed the
animal was about to pounce. He heard its
suffocated screams, throaty and rust-coated, buzzing but a few feet behind him,
the animal’s soupy mouth practically in his ear.

By the time he caught
up, the pastor was kneeling on the side of the path in a shaded spot. He was speaking rapidly. Preston didn’t recognize the language. The pastor’s eyes were open, bulging like the
buck’s that had attacked him moments earlier.

Preston wasn’t sure
what to do, what to say.

He stood for several
minutes, watching, listening to chunky sentences of garbled language, trying to
determine some kind of cadence, but finding none.

As he made his way
down the slope, pine needles crackled.

Sunlight streamed
through the breaks in between the evergreen boughs whose limbs now swayed like
the robed arms of a choir.

The pastor’s hands
had been upraised. Without looking, he
reached for Preston.

“Hey,” Preston
said. “What?”

Preston took the hand
in his. He allowed himself to be pulled,
thighs to face, against the pastor. The
pastor hugged Preston’s legs. “I’m
sorry,” he said in English. “I just need
forgiveness.”

The pressure against Preston’s
legs forced him to either break the pastor’s grip or kneel. He chose the latter.

“I know you don’t
believe,” the pastor said, “but will you do this with me?”

Preston looked over
the pastor’s head, over the crest of the path.
He thought he heard the buck stomping.

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